How can we improve decision making in the face of catastrophic risk?

Abstract

This chapter reviews new insights about thinking and decision making that provide guidelines for reducing the catastrophic impacts from events such as natural disasters and mass atrocities. It describes some pitfalls of intuitions arising from fast thinking that cause problems in the management of disasters and mass atrocities even when one engages in more deliberative thinking. There is thus a need for creating policies, laws, and institutions that highlights the importance of developing long-term strategies for addressing these catastrophic risks while recognizing the tendency for decision makers to exhibit a systematic set of biases and simplified choice rules when thinking about these problems. Decision makers normally deal with risk by combining their intuitive thinking with more deliberative thinking . The recommendations suggested above are designed to address the type of intuitive thinking that decision makers exhibit when dealing with natural disasters, genocide, and other catastrophic events.

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